Warming starts to influence Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe experienced a year like no other in water year 2014-2015, according to the most recent State of the Lake Report issued by the Tahoe Environmental Environmental Center. From this vantage point near Tahoe City, the ski runs of Heavenly Mountain Resort can be seen across the lake. April 2016 photo/Allen Best

Rapid warming of Lake Tahoe noted in latest report by university researchers

by Allen Best

Lake Tahoe is huge and sublime. Mark Twain called it the “fairest picture the whole earth affords” after his visit. Straddling the California-Nevada border, the “vast oval” of blue described by Twain measures 22 miles long by 12 miles wide. It’s also uncommonly deep, a maximum 1,645 feet, making it the 10th deepest lake in the world.

That depth along with the lake’s steep sides give it enormous holding capacity, 39 trillion gallons. It’s enough capacity that the water slopping over the rim into the Truckee River and flowing past Squaw Creek, Northstar and other ski areas entered the lake some 600 years ago, about the time that a young Joan of Arc was growing up on a French farm.

Geoffrey Schladow uses a different metric for describing the lake’s vast quantity. It’s enough water, he says, to cover the entire state of California to 15 inches. “It’s a very steep-sided lake and its very deep,” says Schladow, the director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center. “I have done that calculation several times to convince myself of it,”

That’s a lot of water to warm, and it takes a great deal of energy to warm that much water, Schladow says. But the lake is warming. The latest State of the Lake report issued by the research center in late July concluded that the average water temperature in the lake increased nearly a half degree Fahrenheit in just one year, 2014-2015. It was a drought year and an uncommonly warm year altogether. Still, that’s 15 times the long-term rate of warming.

Warming has taken center stage at Lake Tahoe as scientists continue to monitor the ecology of the lake and its surroundings. For many years, clarity was the central focus, and it remains a concern. Warming and lake clarity are bound together in mountain lakes. But Tahoe’s original problem had a different origin.

Some think that it was once possible such as when Mark Twain first laid eyes on what he called the “noble sheet of blue water” in 1861 to see to a depth of 120 feet. When measurements began in 1968, scientists could see a white Frisbee-type instrument, called the Secchi disk, to a depth of 100 feet. After that, clarity receded to 68 feet in the late 1990s.

Scientists concluded that the problem was how people were using the land along the shores of the giant lake. It was no one thing, but the complex of roads, streets, and houses resulted in more deposition of nitrogen and phosphorous into the lake. It’s called “cultural eutrophication,” defined by an advocacy group called Keep Tahoe Blue as “excessive algal growth due to excessive nutrient levels.”

More important yet are the find sediments—tiny, ground-up particles, smaller than the width of a human hair—that have been entering the lake. There, rather than falling to the bottom, they remain suspended, dulling the transparency of the water.

Runoff from a residential development called Tahoe Keys has been blamed for a substantial portion of the sedimentation that has been impairing the clarity of Lake Tahoe since the 1960s. Photo/Allen Best

That transparency has actually been improving. A summit in 1997 drew then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and other high-ranking officials from California and Nevada and produced a $50 million federal commitment. There has been success. Clarity had been receding a foot a year, but in the last 20 years has started improving. The Seechi disk could be observed to a depth of 77.8 feet in 2014.

On Aug. 31, President Barack Obama will visit the lake to address the annual Lake Tahoe Summit. A White House spokesman said Obama will use the opportunity to underscore a commit to addressing climate change and preserving the country’s natural treasures for future generations.

This year’s State of the Lake report focuses on that changing climate in the Tahoe Basin. There’s a lot to talk about. One of them is the shift from snow to rain. In 1910, snow was responsible for an average 51 percent of total precipitation. In recent decades, that’s dropped to 33 percent. But in the water year of October 2014-September 2015, just 6.5 percent of precipitation fell as snow. Total precipitation that year was about two-thirds of average. Last winter – the stuff for next year’s report – was closer to normal in terms of snowfall.

The larger story is of rising temperatures. The shift is most pronounced in nightly minimums. Since 1911, the average daily minimum temperature has increased by 2.4 degrees C. The average daily maximum temperature has gone up 1.1 degree C.

Water temperatures also increased at Tahoe. The warming water is likely a result of warming air temperatures, Schladow says. Over the last four years, the lake has warmed at a 15 times faster than the long-term warming rate. Last year, was the warmest on record.

Warming water has implications for mixing of water and hence for clarity. Precipitation arriving as rain, instead of snow, is inherently warmer, and as it enters the lake it tends to stay higher in the lake, introducing sediments that deteriorate lake clarity.

Other lakes are also changing as a result of warming temperatures. Schladow was in Italy last week at a conference of scientists devoted to the issues of reduced lake mixing. Many lakes in Europe have much greater reduced mixing than what is being observed at Lake Tahoe. The reduced mixing eliminates oxygen from the lake bottoms, making them uninhabitable by fish. “You’re seeing a lot of undesirable chemical changes. We are long ways from that situation in Lake Tahoe, but if don’t have the usual amount of mixing, we will move to that in the future.”

Schladow sees warming creating new dynamics for Tahoe and other lakes. “What I think is important about climate change is not just that the water is getting warmer, but that it’s starting to change the ways in which lakes work,” he says. “The fact that some of the water on top is warmer in a cold lake makes water move in particular ways. We talk about how oxygen gets to the bottom of the lake. Climate change is altering that. It’s not just changing temperatures, It’s changing how lakes operate.”

Lake Tahoe is prized for its deep blue color, as seen here on the lake’s western shore. Photo/Allen Best

At Lake Tahoe, he says, broad global impacts playing out locally are starting to have a greater impact than urbanization in the basin. “We are getting to the point that climate change is maybe approaching the magnitude of factors like urbanization around the lake,” he says before citing a litany of the changes.

But as other scientists involved with water have started to point out, Schladow wonders if it’s time to reassess standards for action. Many standards were developed in the American West during the 20th century, based on historical records. Climate change is creating new normals—and the normals are constantly changing.

What is happening at Lake Tahoe is also playing out at every lake and every reservoir in the West, Research by a colleague, he says, reveals that the changes occurring at smaller lakes in the Sierra Nevada have been even more brisk.

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About Allen Best

Allen Best is a Colorado-based journalist. He publishes a subscription-based e-zine called Mountain Town News, portions of which are published on the website of the same name, and also writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines.

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